Twice as Good

by Marcus Mabry (Modern Times; $27.50)

President George W. Bush has said of Condoleezza Rice, “Whatever she says, it’s like talking to me.” Mabry writes that many of Rice’s sponsors, from Brent Scowcroft to a Marxist professor, have felt the same affinity, each to be “left scratching his head as he saw Rice make a 180-degree turn away from the core beliefs he thought they shared.” Mabry, who had Rice’s coöperation here, succeeds in giving coherence to her character, from her roots in segregated Birmingham—where her middle-class parents were both inspired and mortified by Martin Luther King’s radicalism—to her broken engagement to the 1975 N.F.L. Rookie of the Year and her bond with George Bush. On Iraq, Mabry has less to offer, in part, perhaps, because of his subject’s detachment; her supreme self-confidence, he writes, has made it hard for her to recognize the disaster unfolding on her watch. ♦

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day